A careful examination of these two nearly contemporaneous texts, in their relationships to each other, can do much to illuminate each of them. Perhaps its greatest potential value for students of English medieval literature, however, lies in the dramatic literary counterpoint the Middle English Prose Merlin provides to Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur. But the value of the Prose Merlin goes far beyond that, for the work is a treasure trove of Arthurian characters, incidents, and motifs - many of which are found nowhere else in Arthurian literature. One of the real values of the Middle English Prose Merlin is that it gives students of medieval Arthurian literature access, though at one remove, to this important Old French work. In contrast to Malory's work, however, which draws upon a wide variety of sources and combines them in a unique fashion, the Middle English Prose Merlin offers a straight-forward and fairly accurate translation into English of a single source, the Merlin section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle, an interconnected set of Arthurian works composed during the first half of the thirteenth century.
Because it pre-dates Malory's work, the Middle English Prose Merlin is considered the earliest piece of Arthurian literature written in English prose. This late medieval Arthurian work was written, scholars believe, near the middle of the fifteenth century, not long before Thomas Malory was composing his Morte D'Arthur. The Middle English Prose Merlin survives in a single manuscript text, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.3.11.
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